Cuttings

JOY DIVISION NEW ORDER MUSIC FOR MINERS  (ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL 14 MAY 1984) VIKINGS ON TOUR 2002 FAC 383 VIKINGS

50 GREAT MANCHESTER ALBUMS From the Buzzcocks to Doves, Britain's second city has unleashed a succession of albums that changed the face of music. Here's your guide to the best of them.... THE DURUTTI COLUMN The Return Of The Durutti Column FACTORY 1979 Cult miserabillst plays super-sad instrumental guitar. For a movement that was meant to be about free minds and expression, punk dogmas were quick to harden. The Durutti Column, aka guitarist Vini Reilly, kicked against them profoundly with nine meditative instrumental pieces, augmented by minimal programmed rhythms and the judicious use of an Echoplex unit, courtesy of producer Martin Hannett. The seemingly improvised results were delicate and melancholic. But there’s still comfort and even joy here. IH JOY DIVISION Unknown Pleasures FACTORY, 1979 Stark and atmospheric - this is their solemn, definitive st...

ODE TO JOY Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures has become one of the most influential albums of all time. Peter Hook and Stephen Morris help Roy Wilkinson trace its genesis through crates of Vimto, mysterious moorland meetings and industrial rhythms. STRAWBERRY STUDIOS SITS on Stockport’s Waterloo Road — a street whose Victorian brickwork and sturdy facades suggest time slipping stoically by. Fifty years before Joy Division arrived to record their debut album, Unknown Pleasures, in April 1979, Waterloo Road was home to the marine engineers F Bamford & Co, experts in the hydrodynamic arts. Bamfords supplied the propellers that powered Sir Henry Segrave to a world water-speed record in 1930. After that successful run, a further dash across Lake Windermere sent Segrave to his death. Of course, you can find portentous signs for Ian Curtis’s suicide anywhere - if you look hard enough. But the link betwee...

THE 20 BEST MANCHESTER ALBUMS 1 JOY DIVISION CLOSER Factory (1980) IAN Curtis was beset by health, psychological and personal problems when Joy Division entered Britannia Row studios to record Closer in March, 1980. Their second tour de force was far removed from its predecessor: side two particularly revealed a new, breathtaking, almost supernatural, symphonic music. Painfully honest and unflinchingly emotional, Closer was Joy Division's triumph and Ian Curtis’ personal testament. By the time of its release, he’d committed suicide.  (Un?)intentional parting message to bandmates:  " You take my place in the showdown. I'll observe with a pitiful eye ” (“ Heart And Soul ”)  Highest UK chart position: 6 3 JOY DIVISION UNKNOWN PLEASURES Factory (1979) FOR...

PRESS RELEASE OF THE YEAR (SO FAR) From the voice of doom to the voice of dance. From the despair and dire of Manchester's dark gloom, the grime and rhyme, to the rich neon world of New York, the rhythm and the riffs. From an Ideal for Living to a a formula for success... Enigmatic, tragic, vocal, silent. Moody or thoughtful recluses. Uncompromising, manipulative, misunderstood, messiahs, musicians. Whatever. One of the most impenetrable bands to have cast its shadow across the face of rock. From their spawning as Warsaw in the thrashing punk, the industrial intensity of Joy Division and the hypnotic electronic swirls of New Order. Ugly and beautiful, abrasive and sensitive, Romantics and Cynics. Brian Edge traces the enigma from its early promise through the cult hysteria and the senseless tragedy of the suicide of Ian Curtis. Blue Monday is one of the most successful indie singles ever made. Love Will Tear Us Apart and Atmosphere as two...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/sep/19/unknown-pleasures-joy-division-peter-hook-review Love will tear us apart, again Andy Beckett on a raw, surprising account of the classic post-punk band Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division by Peter Hook 336pp, Simon & Schuster, £20 Of all the great doomed rock bands, with their mayfly lives and drawn-out, highly profitable after-lives, few have a legend as potent and precisely defined as Joy Division. They played their first concert in January 1978 and their last in May 1980. In that time they released two albums and a few other songs: a pop music close to unique in its icy, addictive bleakness. They wore stark, photogenic clothes and haunted the hollowed-out cities of a decaying northern England. Their singer, Ian Curtis, was so intense onstage that he had epileptic fits. The day before a pivotal first tour of the United States, he hanged himself. He was 23. This solemn version of the Joy Div...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/28/unknown-pleasures-peter-hook-review Here are the young men... A memoir by Joy Division bassist Peter Hook is steeped in guilt, writes Dorian Lynskey Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division Peter Hook Simon & Schuster £20, pp336 It is 16 October 1979. Manchester quartet Joy Division have just played a show in Brussels and are a few days away from recording Atmosphere, the sepulchral masterpiece that will take on uncanny weight seven months later, when the body of 23-year-old singer Ian Curtis is found hanging in his kitchen. On this particular night, however, Curtis is urinating in an ashtray in his bandmates’ youth hostel room. “Ha, you wankers, I’m pissing in your room,” says this tortured poet, this future icon of doomed youth. “Ha ha, pissing in your room!” This anecdote is typical of bass guitarist Peter Hook’s conflicted account of his first band’s cruelly abbreviated existence. The Joy ...

FROM DESPAIR TO WHERE? Hundreds of stars have over-indulged in order to sustain rock’n’roll's central tenet: Live fast, die young. Far fewer have taken the extreme decision deliberately to end their own lives with a bullet or a rope. Fifteen years after the death by suicide of Ian Curtis, the Joy Division singer’s ex-wife has written a book about his life. Why, asks Deborah Curtis, have no lessons been learned? In September 1979, a Manchester group called Joy Division showcased their latest single, 'Transmission', on BBC2's new-wave show, Something Else . The opening camera shots panned in on the members of the band, finally stopping on the ghost-grey frame of the singer, hunched over the microphone, his pale blue eyes half-closed in concentration. As the song went on, Ian Curtis became more animated, jerking his arms and knocking the microphone stand to the floor. No language just sound, that's all w...

Before I embark on the next stage of this blog, namely posts on concerts I attended with relevant clips, etc, I've taken the opportunity to update the following posts with better quality scans: New Order 1982 Feature Mist 1983 07 23 NME Feature 1983 07 The Face Feature 1984 06 Zigzag Feature 1984 08 23 Radio Times  1985 05 17 Powerhouse Melbourne 1985 11 16 NME Feature 1986 04 12 Sounds Feature 1986 09 06 Sounds Feature 1986 10 04 Melody Maker 1986 10 18 NME Feature 1986 10 Mix Feature 1986 11 The Face Feature 1986 Record Mirror Feature 1987 12 19 NME Feature 1987 12 19 Wembley Arena NME 1988 07 Sky Feature 1988 12 03 Melody Maker 1989 01 07 NME 1989 01 28 "Technique" NME Review 1989 01 28 NME Feature 1989 02 04 NME Feature 1989 04 01 Sounds Feature 1989 07 01 NME Cover Referring to FAC 227 1990 05 NME England Poster 1990 08 04 NME Hacienda 1992 01 Vox Tony Wilson 1993 05 08 Melody Maker 1993 05 Q Feature 1993 05 Q "Republic" Revie...